Can Restorative Justice Stop the Schoolhouse-to-Jailhouse Pipeline?

Instead of being kicked out for fighting, stealing, talking back, or
other disruptive behavior, public school students in San Francisco are
being asked to listen to each other, write letters of apology, work out
solutions with the help of parents and educators, or engage in community
service. All these practices fall under the umbrella of “restorative
justice”—asking wrongdoers to make amends before resorting to
punishment.

The program launched in 2009 when the San Francisco Board of
Education passed a resolution for schools to find alternatives to
suspension and expulsion. In the previous seven years, suspensions in
San Francisco spiked by 152 percent, to a total of 4,341—mostly among
African Americans, who despite being one-tenth of the district made up
half of suspensions and more than half of expulsions.

This disparity fed larger social inequalities: Two decades of
national studies have found that expelled or suspended students are
vastly more likely to drop out of school or end up in jail than those
who face other kinds of consequences for their actions.

“My first act as a school board member was to push a student out of
his school,” recalled Jane Kim, a former community organizer who as a
member of the Board of Education needed to approve all expulsions.

“That’s not what I expected to do,” she said, especially when it
seemed to exacerbate the social inequalities she had pledged to fight in
her position.

Board colleague Sandra Lee Fewer said, “Sixty percent of inmates in
the San Francisco county jail have been students in the San Francisco
public school system, and the majority of them are people of color. We
just knew we had to somehow stop this schoolhouse-to-jailhouse
pipeline.”

“In restorative justice, you have to
actually have the offender and the victim sit down and discuss what
happened and how the offender can make it better.”

Fewer and Kim, along with colleague Kim–Shree Maufas, led the
three-year process for the board to officially adopt restorative
justice. Though the task force charged with implementing the policy
received only modest funding, expulsions have fallen 28 percent since
its inception. Less serious cases have shown even more success.
Non-mandatory referrals for expulsion (those not involving drugs,
violence or sexual assault) have plunged 60 percent, and suspensions are
down by 35 percent.

Board
members and many educators say restorative practices have kept students
in school and out of the criminal justice system. “We’re holding kids
more accountable than we did before,” said Kim, who now serves on the
city’s Board of Supervisors. “In restorative justice, you have to
actually have the offender and the victim sit down and discuss what
happened and how the offender can make it better.”

But the data—along with interviews with parents, students, and
educators—reveal that progress so far is halting and uneven. Critics say
that’s because the transition from punitive to restorative justice is
haphazardly evaluated and underfunded. In fact, Peer Courts, a model
program extensively promoted in the Board’s 2009 resolution, was forced
to close this year due to budget cuts. Meanwhile, suspensions and
expulsions are actually rising in some schools that have yet to embrace
restorative practices, often in low-income, high-crime neighborhoods. At
one, Thurgood Marshall High School, suspensions have almost tripled
since 2007.

The resulting picture is a school-by-school patchwork, at best an
unfinished project to reform the traditional juvenile discipline
paradigm. It’s a work-in-progress that contains lessons for educators
and parents in other districts who are looking for effective
disciplinary policies in a time of severe budget cuts.

One school’s quick turnaround

“In the past, we defaulted to the most expedient thing,” said Kevin
Kerr, principal of Balboa High School in San Francisco. “Student
behavior is incorrect, student gets suspended—not really fully thinking
through the process and asking whether this is a good educational
decision for this particular student.”

The tide began to turn in 2009, the same year Kerr took over as
Balboa’s principal. That is when the San Francisco Board of Education
dissolved the district’s discipline task force and created a new task
force charged with implementing restorative justice.

“The biggest question anyone can ask in public education is, ‘Why?
Why do you keep doing that?’” Kerr said. At Balboa, the policy change
triggered an intense school-wide discussion among staff about how to
deal with student misbehavior. Within two years, the school cut
expulsions and suspensions in half as it turned from punishing
misbehavior to embracing restorative practices.

Though
he faces severe budget constraints and rising academic demands, Kerr
concluded that restorative justice “may solve all the other problems, by
creating a disciplinary policy where students feel that they always
have a voice in the process, whether they committed a crime or were the
victim of a crime.”

His faith in the new approach is based in part on the results
documented in a growing number of school districts across the country.
In 1994 the Minnesota Department of Education was the first to embrace
restorative justice. At least two rigorous evaluations—one published by
the department in 2001, and another this year at the University of
Minnesota—found that these practices increased both the safety and
academic performance of schools.

In the Bay Area, three researchers at the University of
California-Berkeley’s School of Law studied the impact of restorative
practices at Cole Middle School, a predominantly minority and low-income
school in West Oakland. Their December 2010 study
found that suspensions dropped 87 percent. Both students and teachers
reported that the program made the school “more peaceful, with fewer
fights among students and better behavior in the classroom, relative to
earlier years.”

As a member of San Francisco Board of Education, Jane Kim led efforts for the district to adopt restorative practices as an alternative to punishment.

San Francisco’s efforts may be the most ambitious yet—and the
immediate results especially promising, given the district’s deep budget
cuts and the complexities of operating in one of the nation’s biggest,
most diverse cities. They stem from a local culture that has already
embraced restorative justice in law enforcement.

“Restorative justice recognizes the crime hurts everyone—victim,
offender and community—and creates an obligation to make things right,”
said Sunny Schwartz, who in 1997 founded an influential restorative
justice program for violent offenders in the San Francisco County Jail,
one of the first in the nation. According to an independent evaluation
published in 2001, Schwartz’s program virtually eliminated in-jail
violence and cut re-arrests for violence by 83 percent. When the San
Francisco Board of Education considered adopting restorative justice in
the schools, it sought her expertise.

Today, Kevin Kerr has pinned to his bulletin board a list of five
“restorative questions” to ask students in trouble. The last and most
important one asks, “What do you think needs to be done to make things
as right as possible?” It’s a question educators like Kerr are asking
themselves as they struggle to reverse what they see as a decade of
damage from punitive school policies.

Difficult in practice

Only the most serious discipline cases ever reach Kerr. Day-to-day
discipline is handled by his dean of students, Kathleen Rodriguez.

Rodriguez first encountered restorative justice three years ago while
working at George Washington High School, when trying to resolve a
problem between a teacher and three boys who became increasingly
disrespectful and defiant in class.

For
help, she looked to Peer Courts, a city-funded restorative justice
program that trains students to run hearings for offenders—or
“respondents,” in restorative justice parlance—who have committed
misconduct that ranges from chronic defiance to theft to fighting. In
its 2009 resolution,
the Board of Education made Peer Courts integral to its transition from
punitive to restorative justice, and cited the program as a resource in
the district’s student and parent handbooks.

As coordinator Tony Litwak hastened to say, the Peer Courts did not
judge guilt or innocence. Instead, he said, they tried to identify who
was hurt by the crime and then help respondents to make things right.

“It was quite a process,” Rodriguez said. “It took a lot of time.”

Litwak and Rodriguez interviewed the teacher, talked with the boys,
met with the parents and recruited a trained peer volunteer to run the
hearing. The boys listened to the teacher and at the end of the process
were asked to explain, in their own words, the teacher’s
responsibilities and the effect of their behavior on the class. They
wrote a letter of apology and performed community service with the
teacher. Afterward, Litwak and Rodriguez worked with the parents to make
sure the students consistently improved their behavior in class.

Other Peer Court cases were more nuanced and involve a combination of
punitive and restorative approaches. In cases of violence or theft
involving multiple kids, the perpetrators most responsible might be
expelled and go through the juvenile justice system, while more
peripheral participants faced a court of peers.

When Rodriguez went to John O’Connell Alternative High School, she
integrated the program into the life of the school, which faced
significant disciplinary problems. Rodriguez was once even physically
attacked by a student who refused to stop talking on her cell phone
during class.

The main benefit of Peer Courts, Rodriguez said, is that it helped
both the volunteers who run the hearings and the kids in trouble to take
responsibility for the process. “You could see the volunteers go from
not so sure to being amazing, developing their leadership skills,” she
said. “The magic of Peer Court is the interaction of peer leaders with
the offenders, who respond to their influence and become more aware of
the harm done.” This, she said, made for better outcomes and more
lasting impact than simple punishment, or even other restorative
programs led by adults instead of kids.

This complex process stands in contrast to the “easy and short
punitive system that’s in place now,” Litwak said. He said that students
“who do enter the traditional justice system never answer to their
peers and are almost always advised by their attorneys to not discuss
the incident. They are also denied the ability to apologize and make
amends to victims and their family members.” Part of the reason the
process took so long, he said, is that it tried to build the empathy,
compassion, and community that might strengthen the student and the
school.

“Nobody is letting anybody off the hook,” Kerr said. “Whenever we
have one of these restorative justice sessions, the perpetrator
inevitably walks out of the room crying. That’s not our goal, but it’s
just natural. We’re human beings, we’re going to have a sense of
compassion for this person that we harmed, once we have a chance to see
how our actions made them feel.”

Carrots and sticks

Restorative justice is also implemented directly in classrooms, in
the form of “circles” in which students talk through problems before
they get out of hand.

“The teacher doesn’t yell or send anyone out of class,” said a
student at Everett Middle School, one of the district’s three
demonstration schools for the program. “Instead we circle up and
everybody gets a say in how to fix it.” He added: “It’s boring, most of
the time, but it’s better than everybody being angry. That’s how it is
in my house.”

“There’s no carrot for the kids,” Taylor said. “All they see is the
stick. There’s nothing for them to strive for. Most of them have never
been asked, never been taught by teachers or parents, to be a different
type of person.”

Some kids still get kicked out of school. On the week Kerr and
Rodriguez were interviewed for this article, they suspended one student
and referred another for expulsion—one who had previously gone through a
restorative process, to no effect. The difference for Kerr and
Rodriguez is that they now see punishment as the last, not the first,
resort.

Every expulsion involves a serious crime, and often the expulsion
process works in tandem with a legal one. Once expelled, a student
might, depending on the case, be assigned to attend the Civic Center
Secondary School, which handles the district’s hardest cases, or to
attend a court-ordered school like Walden House, Woodside Learning
Center or Log Cabin Ranch, most of which are operated by the Juvenile
Probation Department. The worst-case scenario is that the student drops
out and never comes back.

Shawn Taylor is the youth transitional services coordinator for the
Seneca Center, which works with kids in court-ordered schools to help
them get their lives back on track. He said he believes in “graduated
sanctions” for misbehavior, but the problem is that simple expulsion can
push them further away from school and towards life on the street.

“There’s no carrot for the kids,” Taylor said. “All they see is the
stick. There’s nothing for them to strive for. Most of them have never
been asked, never been taught by teachers or parents, to be a different
type of person.” Whatever its limitations, he said, restorative justice
at least tries to do that.

Expensive proposition

Restorative justice is not without enemies in San Francisco. Its
deadliest foe is funding. Over the past two years, San Francisco’s
school district has been forced to cut $133 million from budget, leaving
it with $577 million this year.

As a result, the task force charged with the transition from punitive
to restorative justice was allocated $664,763, a modest amount given
the size of the system and the ambitious goals of the program. To date,
the task force has trained staff at fewer than one-quarter of the
district’s 107 schools. In fact, neither Kerr nor most of his teachers
have received any formal training in restorative techniques. Instead
they have embraced the initiative on their own. A significant portion of
the task force budget goes to consultants and paying for substitutes
while the teachers are in training.

Budget constraints also apply to independent nonprofits that provide
restorative justice services and expertise. After the Board of Education
embraced restorative justice in 2009, experienced, successful programs
like Peer Courts did not receive additional funds and were not able to
expand. Peer Courts received $100,000 from the city in the 2010-11
school year, which “is basically our total program budget,” Litwak said.
That year, Litwak worked with 50 students, the same number of students
he did in 2008.

In early 2012, the program abruptly closed, “due to systemic budget
cuts over the last few years, and an increasingly difficult environment
for alternative justice programs,” as its website announced.

To Lisa Schiff and Tim Lennon, the lack of financial commitment calls
into question the district’s ability to deliver on the promise of
restorative justice. The two are spouses and longtime leaders in Parents
for Public Schools and the parent-teacher associations at the schools
their two children attended.

“The trouble is that they have $600,000 to address a $10 million problem,” Lennon said.

Thanks to budget cuts, Schiff added, “There’s been no rigorous
analysis to say what kind of impact this program is really having.
That’s too bad, because during a time of competing resources, we want to
be able to defend programs that are working or change them to be more
effective. You can’t do that without good data. And unfortunately, in
this case, the lack of analysis and planning means that kids are getting
physically hurt,” she argued, because violent offenders are not dealt
with effectively.

The district acknowledges the program’s challenges but says it has
made progress in two years. In the 2010-2011 school year, it trained 823
employees, including the entire staff at three demonstration schools.
This year, said Kerri Berkowitz, San Francisco Unified’s restorative
practices coordinator, 35 schools have requested on-site
training—something she is hard-pressed to provide.

“Our capacity right now is a challenge,” Berkowitz said. “Our team is
made up of myself and a coach, and we’re hiring another full-time
coach. Plus, there’s very little time in the school day—teachers don’t
have very many professional development days, and we need funding to
hire substitutes so that teachers can leave their classrooms. We have
some money, but it’s not enough.”

Some schools late adopters

Berkowitz has never conducted training at the 769-student Thurgood
Marshall Academic High School, which could use her help. Suspensions
there jumped from 115 in the 2006-2007 school year to 315 last year,
while they were falling across the district.

Thurgood Marshall is located in the Bayview-Hunters Point
neighborhood, where 30 percent of families make less than $10,000 a
year. Homicide is the leading cause of death for children in the
neighborhood, according to the Hunters Point Family social service
agency. That statistic hit home when Thurgood Marshall student Andy Zeng
was killed and mutilated in April. Two other neighborhood teenagers are
accused.

As in many schools throughout the district, poverty and punishment go
hand and hand. When Edgar Ulu, a student at Thurgood Marshall, was
suspended in 2009 for fighting in the lunch line, he was taken to the
principal’s office and suspended for one week. Edgar said there was no
effort to discuss the incident or repair any damage done to the other
student or the school—he was simply sent home.

In his case, at least, suspension worked. “I learned my lesson,” he
said. That week he cut off his abundant Afro, a symbolic step intended
to convey his desire to get serious about school. He graduated in 2011
and is now attending San Francisco City College.

“Thurgood’s a good school,” said Edgar, who as a linebacker was named
to the high-school All-City team. “It’s just that they don’t have a
football field, they don’t have enough extracurricular activities. Kids
don’t feel connected.”

Administrators at Thurgood Marshall did not respond to requests for interviews.

The Board of Education’s resolution to adopt restorative justice did
not force schools to adopt the practices, though rates of expulsion and
suspension are now part of how the Board evaluates the performance of
principals. Instead, the resolution funded a plan to gradually introduce
the concept and train the staffs over a period of many years. In the
meantime, deans, principals and teachers still have wide latitude in how
they deal with disciplinary issues. District officials said the idea of
diverting students from punishment spreads incrementally and varies
school by school, social worker by social worker.

“The challenge is that at some schools there are only pockets of
belief in restorative practices,” said Claudia Anderson, executive
director of Student Support Services for San Francisco Unified. She is
the district’s chief expulsion officer and leader of its restorative
justice efforts. “If students continue to make inappropriate choices,
then there’s a lot of pressure to fall back on traditional responses
like expulsion.”

Even when administrators implement restorative practices, the staff sometimes botch the process, and parents sometimes resist.

Two parents, who asked that their names not be used to protect
the privacy of their middle-school daughter, said that when their
daughter was attacked by two other girls in an assault they described as
“life-threatening,” they were “pressured” to go through a restorative
process that required the girl to face the classmates who assaulted
her—a terrifying prospect. Ultimately, after requesting a more
traditional disciplinary response to the attack, the family decided to
leave the school, while the offenders remained. The family reported
feeling victimized twice: by the attack and by the restorative process,
which they said resulted in no consequences for the attackers.

“In restorative justice, the total focus is on re-integrating the
perpetrator,” said the father. “But too often it comes at the expense of
the victim.”

The district’s Claudia Anderson is not daunted. “There’s always going
to be criticism,” she said. “For a decade we went through this
zero-tolerance era. And quite frankly it didn’t work. It didn’t make one
bit of difference.” The results so far suggest that the San Francisco
experiment, while just getting started, could bear fruit if given the
resources and time the staff need to develop it. The district has
scheduled meetings with parents at 18 schools of the course of Winter
and Spring 2012, to educate them about the program and, at schools where
it’s been implemented, to get feedback on progress.

These conversations are happening all across the country. Nancy
Riestenberg has coordinated restorative justice efforts in Minnesota
public schools since 1994, which gives her a long-term perspective on
the challenges facing San Francisco teachers and administrators as they
ramp up the program.

“The research said that it takes three to five years to implement
anything in schools,” Riestenberg said. “So everyone in San Francisco
should take a deep breath and proceed as calmly as they can. You’re
building a new system because the old system wasn’t working. And that’s
to be applauded.”

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This article is republished through a special collaboration between Greater Good,
the UC Berkeley-based magazine that covers research into the roots of
compassion, happiness, and altruism, and YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. A different version of this story was funded and published by the San Francisco Public Press and the Center for Public Integrity,
and received a 2011 PASS Award from the National Council on Crime and
Delinquency. This version has been updated to include new information,
such as the closure of Peer Courts.